Change of Plans

I've let Virtue Ethics Digest sit fallow over more than one winter month, while I finished out my first semester teaching Ethics and Intro to Philosophy at a new (and better) institution, then journeyed out to the Midwest to vacation with my wife, my children, my family and hers -- all currently in the process of blending -- and afterwards threw myself into preparation for several sections of Ethics this semester, rethinking and reworking material, using the course management system to begin building an extensive online environment for our little community of moral enquiry.

The semester now in full swing, and my vacation from blogging stretched out about a few as is feasible, not to say reasonable or responsible, it's now time to simply carve out the time I've been meaning, planning, desiring -- but not actually choosing or following through on -- to start writing new entries for Virtue Ethics Digest and my other main blog Orexis Dianoētikē.

Bernie Madoff, Happy at Last?

It has been several years since the Bernie Madoff story first broke, gradually  exposing more and more portions of a financial investing scam perpetrated for years, a genuine Ponzi scheme, whereby investors were bilked put of quite literally billions of dollars, which were then used to maintain the appearance of high financial yields for investors earlier in, higher up in the pyramid.   It became a more and more desperate juggling act, bound to bust eventually, but only after the sheer number of accounts in the air became unmanageable.

Much has already been written about the elaborate structure, scope, and details of the scam itself, and the lengthy lists of those individuals and institutions which lost money -- often money they could ill-afford  -- has long been worked out.  In fact, one might think there is little left to say about the whole Madoff affair, if it were not for the recent publication of truth and Consequences: Life Inside the Madoff Family, penned by Laurie Sandel, who interviewed in depth the surviving members of Bernie Madoff's family -- his son, Mark, killed himself after the revelation of the scam, in which he appears to have been unwittingly involved.